Two months ago I was riding bikes through Khmer ruins in Laos.
Three months ago I was exploring Northern Thailand, wandering through temples and learning a little bit more about Buddhism.
Four months ago I was laying on an island in Cambodia thinking about how damn good this life was and wondering why I would ever want to leave.
Five months ago I was on a culinary road trip through Vietnam eating as much pho and bun bo as I possibly could.
Six months ago I was learning how to scuba dive in the Philippines and seven months ago I was traipsing around Japan and Taiwan, eating, traveling in awe through clean and efficient subway and train stations.
Life is wildly different now and those days that weren’t all that long ago feel like they were lived by someone else. It’s like I read a really epic book about someone’s adventures and I’ve closed it now, it’s on a shelf for display only.
The thing is, Luke and I came back from this trip exhausted, ready for some stability, some routine. So that’s exactly what we gave ourselves. For the past two months we’ve been waking up, working, going to the gym, eating lunch and working some more.
In the whirlwind of seeing family and friends, of trying to get our professional lives off the ground again, of emails and Facebook and Instagram flooding our lives like never before, we kind of forgot to digest all that happened.
We forgot to look back through pictures, the pictures we swore we’d go through and print out and make an old school album with.
We forgot to remember inside jokes, to read through the journal I religiously kept every few days. In fact, I haven’t even written about our last few days in Thailand because,well, I just sort of forgot.
But our time in the US is quickly coming to an end. In just over a week we’ll be en-route again. This time to the UK to see Luke’s family and friends, to setup a routine there, to do some exploring and revisiting.
All the movement, the stirring and thoughts of packing and relocating reminded me that, hey, um, this happened.
While we were traveling I tried so hard to hold onto each moment, probably too hard. I could feel time going too quickly, the days were passing and I wasn’t ready for them to be over yet. At the end of our trip I was ready to go home and rest, but I wasn’t ready for those moments to end.
I don’t want to forget. I want to always remember the heartbreaking museums, the hilarious people we met, the tours, the wilderness, the boat rides and train rides and moments where we laughed so damn hard we cried until our eyes swelled.
I want to remember the beaches, what it’s like to breath underwater for the first time, the sunsets and floating bars, the views from mountain tops that took our breath away.
I don’t ever want to forget that I kind of had an epic life for five months this year.